21st October 2008 Archive

Motorola's first Android-based phone won't arrive in the US until the second quarter of next year. Europe will have to wait until the third quarter. To compensate, the company's going for a novelty twofer.

UK regulator Ofcom has published an update to its consultation on spectrum management for the maritime and aeronautical sectors, explaining that it has no intention to charge lifeboats a quarter of a million quid to use radios.

Here's some excellent news for El Reg's enormous Paris Hilton fanbase: The extravagantly talented heiress has declared she's decamping to London, having already spent a month here slumming it in a £7,500-a-month Hampstead pad while filming a show for MTV.

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has equipped his dog with a satnav tracker collar, according to reports. The device is linked to the Russian national nav-sat constellation, GLONASS, rather than the more commonly used American-run GPS.

SNW showed that there are three flash storage plays emerging: flash in the shelf, flash in the controller and flash in the server. Only 3PAR out of the top 12 or so storage vendors does not have a flash strategy.

Intel won’t be launching its new Core i7 'Nehalem' processors and X58 - aka - 'Tylersburg' - chipset until some time in November, so we’ve got to tread carefully with this preview of the Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard. Register Hardware has reported on both the processor and chipset - however, we can’t reveal processor performance figures until the date of the official launch.

An Arizona inventor has been granted a patent on his Taser-proof fabric, which he intends to sell to police officers to protect them from villains toting electric stunguns. However, it has been argued that protective garments of this sort will in fact endanger policemen's lives.

The US Navy has awarded funds to develop a self-contained remote electronic sniffer unit which could be delivered to the holds of suspect vessels by a robot helicopter to detect "chemical, explosive, and illegal drug residues".

If you thought you've heard of every digital music idea going, try this one on for size. Lala, the former CD-swapping site, is offering you the chance to "buy" the right to be streamed a song for life for 10 cents. For that, you'll never get a licence to an actual copy - physical, or digital. Lala calls it a "Websong".

IBM today is taking the wraps off a new line of entry-level mainframes, the System z10 Business Class server. The z10 BC is a cut-down version of the existing z10 Enterprise Class machine, which launched in March 2008 using Big Blue's quad-core z6 CISC mainframe processor.

We consumers are cracking. We don't trust the banks. The banks aren't lending to businesses. The businesses are firing workers and buying less. So we consumers are spending less. It's a mess. The economy is in an almost certain recession and storage sales could head south.

These days, David wouldn't stand a chance against Goliath. Slingshot-only attacks against an armoured giant carrying a big club will get you nowhere. Goliath, you see, has gone and bought Norton armour. So David has to go looking for a partner.

The Taliban has now ordered mobile operators to shutdown daytime access to their networks in the Afghan province of Ghazni. The hard-line Islamic militia says it's annoyed that wireless signals are being used to locate its insurgent gunmen.

When Alan Scully switched from a PC to a Mac earlier this year, he thought it would bolster his online security. For the most part, it has - with one notable exception. His Skype client, which he relies on for international calls, has churned out a demonstrable increase in obscene messages that he's powerless to stop.

Rackable Systems might be a niche player in the server racket, but the company's server engineering has allowed it to stay in business since 1999 and still, in many ways, set the pace for density in the data center. Today, the company revved its 2U rack servers, dubbed the C2005.

Apple reported a stronger-than-expected 26 per cent rise in quarterly net profit as the gadget maker sold a record number of Macs, iPods, and iPhones and - for the first time - outsold Research in Motion's addictive CrackBerry.